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It’s not like he was hiding the plan. When Donald Trump campaigned for a return to the White House in 2024, he openly embraced a platform of revenge and retribution against his political enemies. Even when allies practically begged him to swear off the idea of using the Presidency as a tool of personal vengeance, Trump was explicit about his intentions. I have often thought back to an interview he did in June of last year, in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, with the TV shrink Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, a Trump fan and supporter. “You have so much to do,” McGraw said to him. “You don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right.” Trump’s response was to smirk. “Well, revenge does take time. I will say that,” he said. “And sometimes revenge can be justified. Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can.”

On Friday morning, the revenge vibes were strong when the news broke of an F.B.I. search at the Maryland home and D.C. office of John Bolton, Trump’s third first-term national-security adviser, who has since become one of his most frequent and acerbic public critics. Details about the raid were sparse, but initial reports suggested that officials were looking for evidence that Bolton had disclosed classified information to reporters and in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.” (Trump’s first-term Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to stop publication of the book—a best-selling account of the discord and dysfunction that marked Trump’s foreign policy during his initial White House stint.) Bolton could hardly have been surprised that the attack on him was renewed. In a new edition of the book that came out in January of 2024, he had warned, “Trump really only cares about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.”

So let’s stipulate that whatever comes of the F.B.I. raid on Bolton, legally speaking, there is a certain awful predictability to it. In his first months back in office, Trump has made clear that his vengeful threats were not simply campaign-season bluster. He has stripped security clearances (including Bolton’s) and fired career civil servants for having ties to his opponents; he has demanded Justice Department investigations of them. Earlier in August, Trump’s D.O.J. launched probes of two of his most outspoken legal adversaries—the California Democrat Adam Schiff, who led the House’s first impeachment inquiry of Trump, in 2019, and the New York attorney general Letitia James, whose office successfully prosecuted Trump in a civil-fraud case. We don’t know yet where this will all end up—it’s far from certain that these investigations will lead to prosecutions, let alone a prison wing full of Trumpian “enemies of the people.” But we can already say for sure that he wasn’t just bluffing with his campaign-season threats; how is it possible that, so many years into this Trump era, there is not a more precise vocabulary for describing how it is that we are constantly being surprised when Trump and his advisers do exactly what we have expected them to do?

A worrisome indicator for how this will all turn out is how unabashedly Team Trump now pursues its vengeance agenda—they are no longer really even trying to hide it. Back in January, when Kash Patel still needed the votes of a few not-fully-Trumpified Republican senators to win confirmation as F.B.I. director, he insisted that he had no intention of allowing America’s chief law-enforcement agency to be drawn into the messy work of carrying out Trump’s vendettas. “There will be no retributive actions taken by any F.B.I. should I be confirmed as F.B.I. director,” Patel said—under oath, I would point out—at his confirmation hearing. When asked about an appendix to his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters”—which named sixty people who were part of a supposed “Executive Branch deep state” arrayed against Trump, with Bolton, and many others who’ve already drawn Trump’s second-term fire, included—Patel said, “It’s not an enemies list. It’s a total mischaracterization.” Yet there he was on Friday morning, tweeting even before the news of the Bolton raid was public: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” Will we hear from any Republicans other than the two who voted against him that Patel has made a mockery of his sworn Senate testimony? Don’t count on it.

Asked about the raid, Trump himself denied any specific foreknowledge. Sort of. “He’s not a smart guy, but he could be a very unpatriotic guy, we’re going to find out,” he told reporters on Friday morning. “I know nothing about it; I just saw it this morning. They did a raid.”

Just a week earlier, on August 13th, Trump had been quite explicit about his anger toward Bolton, complaining on Truth Social that his onetime national-security adviser remains one of the media’s favorite “fired losers and really dumb people” to quote with attacks on him. It is certainly true that Bolton has continued to speak out against Trump at a time when many other former Trump Administration officials have fallen silent, despite having previously called him everything from a “threat to democracy” to a textbook “fascist” who “prefers the dictator approach to government.”

The timing is notable: Trump’s Truth Social post about Bolton had nothing to do with classified information and everything to do with the fact that Bolton was one of the loudest reality checks on television about the President’s embarrassing summit a day earlier with Vladimir Putin, in Alaska. “Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won,” Bolton said on CNN right after the two leaders abruptly ended their meeting with no deal to announce. This was precisely the statement that triggered Trump’s post: “What’s that all about?” the President complained. “We are winning on EVERYTHING.” Bolton has continued to offer sharp-edged assessments of Trump’s so-far-unsuccessful efforts to bring about an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine; he appeared on CNN Thursday night—hours before the F.B.I. raid, in fact—giving an interview in which he attributed the “confusion” about Trump’s negotiations with Putin to the Administration’s failure to say clearly what has been discussed, and called out “the White House’s concern that Trump didn’t stand up to Putin in Alaska.”

I don’t know whether getting Bolton to shut up in public is a goal of this F.B.I. raid or merely a possible ancillary benefit for Trump. Either way, it represents a direct attack on one of the President’s most informed and unrelenting critics, a lifelong conservative whose direct-from-the-Situation-Room account of Trump’s ignorance, perfidy, and willingness to betray the national interest in service of his own self-interest provides an important counterpoint to the daily stream of pro-Trump propaganda now embraced by most of the American right.

As I was digesting the news of Friday morning’s raid, a historian friend sent along a quote from Huey Long, the populist Louisiana politician who showed the political potential of an American-style demagogue, winning his state’s governorship and a seat in the Senate at a time when right-wing fascism was ascending in Europe, in the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties. Long had observed that the imposition of American-style fascism would not require a military takeover but “would only have to get the right President and Cabinet” to emerge as “a hundred-per-cent American movement.” What’s more, he had added, “it would be quite unnecessary to suppress the press. A couple of powerful newspaper chains and two or three papers with practical monopolies of certain fields would go out to smear, calumniate, and blackmail opponents into silence, and ruthlessly to eliminate competitors.”

Long’s uncomfortably relevant assessment is a reminder that Trump’s actions do not exist outside history. The tools that worked so effectively to silence critics in the brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century—or in Putin’s Russia, for that matter—work just as well when they are deployed by America’s vengeful President. ♦

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The Korey Stringer Institute, at the University of Connecticut, is named after an N.F.L. player who died of exertional heatstroke. The lab’s main research subjects have been athletes, members of the military, and laborers. But, with the extreme heat wrought by climate change, even mild exertion will put more and more of us in harm’s way; in many parts of the United States, a combined heat wave and power outage could cause staggering fatalities. Dhruv Khullar, a New Yorker contributor, practicing physician, and professor of health policy, visited the Stringer Institute to undergo a heat test—walking uphill, for ninety minutes, in a hundred-and-four-degree heat—to better understand what’s happening. “I just feel extremely puffy everywhere,” Khullar sighed. “You’d have to cut my finger off just to get my wedding ring off.” By the end of the test, he spoke of experiencing cramps, dizziness, and a headache. Khullar discussed the dangers of heatstroke with Douglas Casa, the lab’s head, who nearly died of the condition as a young athlete. “Climate change has taken this into the everyday world for the everyday American citizen. You don’t have to be a laborer working for twelve hours; you don’t have to be a soldier in training,” Casa tells him. “This is making it affect so many people, even just during daily living.” Although the treatment for heat-related illness is straightforward, Casa says that implementation of simple preventive measures remains challenging—and that there is much we need to do to better prepare for the global rise in temperatures.

This segment originally aired on August 25, 2023.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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Donald Trump is the most tech-friendly President in American history. He enlisted social media to win office; he became a promoter—and beneficiary—of cryptocurrency, breaking long-standing norms around conflicts of interest; and, in his second term, he brought Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest tech baron, to the White House, to disrupt the federal government in the manner of a Silicon Valley startup. While Musk was eventually ousted—or “flamed out,” as Katie Drummond puts it, for being “loud”—the influence of DOGE continues to reshape our lives in ways we have barely begun to understand.

Drummond is the global editorial director of Wired, and in this episode she talks with The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent Evan Osnos about the unique intersection of technology and politics, which Wired has tracked assiduously. Tech companies and A.I., Osnos notes, are driving the agenda in the Trump Administration. “If they’ve learned anything from what Elon Musk was able to accomplish,” Drummond says, “it’s that this is open season.” Drummond also sounds a cautionary note about some of the doomsday framing of the A.I. revolution. Corporate leaders “want this technology to sound as big and daunting and powerful and impressive and scary as they possibly can,” she explains. In some cases, “that hyperbole masks the fact that these individuals have a stake in exactly the scenarios that they are outlining.”

This segment originally aired on The Political Scene on July 26, 2025.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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A portrait of Anthony Roth Costanzo in his costume for “Galas,” at Little Island on August 3, 2025.Photograph by George Etheredge for The New Yorker

Last summer’s season at Little Island scored a hit with Anthony Roth Costanzo’s glittering version of “The Marriage of Figaro,” in which the countertenor sang all the parts in Mozart’s masterpiece, from basso suitor to twittering soubrette. That show was, in its way, radically exposing: at one point, Costanzo swallowed a scoping camera so that the audience could see his vocal cords flexing as his voice changed registers. This summer, Costanzo becomes just one character: the histrionic diva at the center of “Galas,” Charles Ludlam’s camp melodrama from 1983, directed by Eric Ting, inspired by Maria Callas, whose operatic life rivalled the roles she played onstage. The part should fit the extravagantly gifted Costanzo like a long buttoned glove; his dark glamour recalls Callas’s mid-century fabulousness, and his extraordinary sound echoes her own smoky timbre, the resonance of a voice and a personality on fire.—Helen Shaw (Little Island; Sept. 6-28.)

Two disparate, if not duelling, impulses inhabit “Take a Banana for the Ride,” a solo show written and performed by the comedian Jeff Ross. One is the roasting he’s famous for, sometimes directed at audience members (latecomers beware) and sometimes at himself (“a Jeff Bezos blow-up doll”). But barbed humor proves to be only the skin encasing Ross’s true purpose: gleaning life lessons from the deaths of loved ones, beginning in adolescence when his mother passed away from leukemia. Like bananas, he claims, we’re better with bruises—they make us sweeter. Really? In my experience, including this show, the result is often mushiness. Next to the freshness of his jokes, Ross’s lessons—relationships are what matter, laughter is healing—seem all the more overripe.—Dan Stahl (Nederlander; through Sept. 28.)

The sisters of the pop-rock band Haim, who are all multi-instrumentalists, began as members of a family cover band, and have since jelled into a unit that is as synthesized as it is referential. The trio’s repertoire includes hooky Americana influenced by R. & B. (“Days Are Gone,” from 2013), the soft rock of the eighties (“Something to Tell You,” from 2017), and just about everything else on the monumental 2020 album “Women in Music Pt. III”—electro-pop, funk, country rock, even reggae. The band’s new album, “I Quit,” produced by Danielle Haim with Rostam Batmanglij, is even more eclectic, if a little chaotic—representative of a band that is eager to do everything and too talented not to try.—Sheldon Pearce (Madison Square Garden; Sept. 8.)

Trajal Harrell’s “Monkey Off My Back or the Cat’s Meow.”Photograph by Tiberio Sorvillo

The vastness of the Park Avenue Armory can swallow dance performances that aren’t appropriately scaled. But Trajal Harrell’s “Monkey Off My Back or the Cat’s Meow” was created for a cavernous space, the Schiffbau of the Schauspielhaus, in Zürich, where the American-born choreographer led a dance ensemble from 2019 to 2024. Like much of Harrell’s work, this is a runway show in which Harrell presides (sometimes as Anna Wintour) over a large, diverse cast of dancers who strut the catwalk in a profusion of outré outfits, mixing in voguing and Butoh. Here, the idea of freedom is introduced through recitations of the Declaration of Independence, and the difference between liberty and indulgence is in danger of being blurred.—Brian Seibert (Park Avenue Armory; Sept. 9-20.)

“Bye-bye doesn’t mean forever,” the title song of the ABBA jukebox musical “Mamma Mia!” declares. So true—both for this megahit’s return to Broadway and for its single-mom heroine, Donna (Christine Sherrill). As a free-spirited rocker on a Greek island, she hooked up with three men one fateful summer in 1979; none stuck around, but one impregnated her. Which one? That’s what her daughter, Sophie (Amy Weaver), now twenty, aims to find out by inviting all three, sight unseen, to her wedding. The breezy absurdity of the plot hardly matters in the face of the show’s brio; like an ABBA banger, it sweeps you up in its emotional current, especially when Sherrill sings. Plus, there’s a chorus line in swim flippers.—D.S. (Winter Garden; open run.)

Isabelle Weingarten and Guillaume des Forêts, in “Four Nights of a Dreamer.”Photograph courtesy Janus Films

Robert Bresson’s 1971 drama “Four Nights of a Dreamer” (now in a new restoration), a distinguished entry in the “kids these days” genre, borrows some nineteenth-century youths from Dostoyevsky’s short story “White Nights.” In the velvety elegance of Paris, Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts, nearly a Timothée Chalamet look-alike), a floppy-haired painter, dissuades Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) from jumping into the Seine when her fiancé abandons her. Jacques—who follows women in the street, dictates romantic fantasies into a tape recorder, and plays them back to inspire his portraits—falls instantly in love with Marthe and, so, agrees to help her win her fiancé back. Bresson, tuning in to the times with wry views of rockers and hippies, exalts his protagonist’s self-sacrificing devotion as untimely and sublime.—Richard Brody (Film Forum; Sept. 5-18.)

Studies have shown that listening to classical music can help relieve anxiety. (One might imagine that these investigations exclude dissonant works like “The Rite of Spring,” Ligeti’s “Devil’s Staircase” étude, and most things by Xenakis.) The music series MindTravel wholeheartedly agrees with those findings: it aims to amplify the wellness benefits of music, combining performances with meditation and mindfulness practices. Continue your Labor Day relaxation into the week with a “silent” concert in Central Park. Each participant puts on headphones and listens to a minimalist composition being created in real time by the tech entrepreneur and theoretical-physics nerd Murray Hidary. You’ll have to bring your own blanket or chair, but the music may move you to leave it behind and float through the trees.—Jane Bua (Naumburg Bandshell; Sept. 4.)

For many years, the singer-songwriter Trent Reznor stood at the center of the industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails as a one-man wrecking crew, singing out front while also playing most of the instruments and serving as a producer. N.I.N.’s 1989 début album, the synth-powered “Pretty Hate Machine,” established Reznor as a gifted polymath, but it was “The Downward Spiral” (1994) that defined the band’s moody sound, bridging techno, hard rock, and noise. Since 2016, Reznor has been joined by Atticus Ross, with whom he has composed several uncanny film scores. The “Peel It Back” tour plays directly into the eeriness of N.I.N.’s sonic ecosystem; set across two stages, 3-D images are projected to generate a hallucinatory environment.—S.P. (Barclays Center; Sept. 2-3.)

Illustration by Patricia Bolaños

A few weeks ago, a new bar co-owned by Lucinda Williams was launching in the East Village, and, this being New York City, it was sorta no big deal that Williams herself would be the opening-night headliner. Lucinda’s—situated in the spot that was formerly HiFi, and before that Brownies, a tiny, quintessential rock-music venue that, from the eighties until 2002, hosted countless indie-rock acts on their way up (Cibo Matto, the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs)—was now kitted out as a honky-tonk dive. The dingy walls were plastered with art work of Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe; stained-glass pendant lights cast an amber glow over the bar and a few booths in the back. The house was packed, the bar was cash (a beer goes for eight or nine dollars; a glass of wine an undive-like fifteen), and Laura Cantrell, in an emerald top with dark-red hair and the voice of an angel, sang a few earnest country numbers. An hour or so later, Williams, fabulous at seventy-two, in a platinum-blond shag and New York City-black pants, jacket, and Converse, took the stage and ran down the concept: “That’s what this bar is all about: dirt and sweat. Dirty and sweaty.” Then she rasped and slithered into the rockabilly banger “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” kicking off a ten-song set while the crowd surged forward with screams and hoots. A couple weeks later, on a sparser Monday, there was more live music—part of the bar’s no-cover programming of bluegrass, country, and Delta blues. Brian (Howlin’) Hurd, of Daddy Long Legs, screeched and belted and played the hell out of his harmonica, sliding through several steel-guitar and stand-up-bass blues-rock numbers, with titles such as “My Baby Done Gone.” “There’s people two-stepping up there,” one patron, still in polite mode while sipping a Jameson on the rocks, observed. Soon, lone dancers joined the couples, swinging in Doc Martens and cowboy boots, muscle Ts and halter tops and jean skirts. “If I don’t go crazy, I will surely lose my mind,” Howlin’ Hurd growled, sounding not a little like Johnny Cash.

“A Brighter Summer Day,” from 1991.Photograph from Janus Films / Everett

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989)

I am of the demographic that still pronounces Socrates “So-crates” because of this 1989 time-travel classic, wherein Bill and Ted, affable metalheads behind on their history homework, transport some of humankind’s inspirational (and slightly heinous) figures to their beloved San Dimas, California. The greatest bit of wisdom is their own: be excellent to each other.

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

Yang’s gorgeous, sad movie looks back at what it was like to be young in the Taiwan of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, growing up alongside a new society but still beholden to the wild swings of passion and cruelty that cloud the horizons of all teen-agers.

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
The greatest of all hangout movies. I have no idea how accurate Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age tale was to life in Austin, Texas, in 1976, but it perfectly captures the desire to find your tribe, as well as that melancholy ecstasy of the last day of school—and the anticipation of the fall, to see who changed and who didn’t.

Bring It On (Peyton Reed, 2000)
A masterpiece of deeper-than-you-think teen cinema, “Bring It On” is a garishly fun story of rival cheerleading squads, full of cheers and routines that will get permanently etched in your brain. The movie also manages to deliver commentary on the wrongs of cultural theft. Bonus points for Cliff Pantone, an iconically late-nineties instantiation of the “edgy outsider” turned boyfriend material trope.

Bottoms (Emma Seligman, 2023)

“Revenge of the Nerds,” only it’s two uncool lesbians—played by the generational talents Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri—who aspire to make out with cheerleaders . . . so they start a fight club. A glorious reminder of what it is like to be young and absurd.

The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father. I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.

—Mahmoud Darwish

The war that has engulfed Israel, the Gaza Strip, and well beyond since October 7, 2023, has confronted the world with much on which it had never set eyes before. In scope and brutality, Hamas’s assault on Israelis exceeded any prior Palestinian act. Israel’s military attacks and forced starvation in Gaza are an onslaught governed by unusual rules, in which the death of Palestinian fighters seems like collateral damage, while the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, appears the main event. Killing is the purpose. Death is everywhere, its victims uncertain when or where it will strike next. Horror also has come at the hands of the West’s collusion and Arab governments’ indifference, which is no different from complicity.

October 7th turned relations between Israelis and Palestinians upside down. How much of this matched Hamas’s planning and calculation, how much the chaotic, bottled-up frustrations and furies of fighters and civilians of all stripes, is debatable. Confined to the Strip, captives for years, often from birth, because of the Israeli blockade, Gazans could set eyes but not feet on lands from which parents and grandparents had been forced to flee. When Hamas breached the fence that separated Israel from Gaza, many followed the organization’s deadly script; others seized the opportunity to flood into what they considered stolen territory, to brutally lash out at those they deemed their captors, and to kidnap those they could hold as prisoners. In the short distance from Gaza to southern Israel, they were transformed in little time from conquered to conqueror, victim to perpetrator, detainee to abductor.

Yet for all that it changed, the war was neither new, anomalous, nor aberrant. Not an abnormal deviation from traditional Israeli-Palestinian dynamics but their culmination. Not the wave of the future but the past’s formidable revenge. Amid the vagaries of the decades-old clash between two nations vying for the same plot of land, one constant has been violence, perpetrated and endured, on minor and colossal scales. If Palestinian attacks against Israelis never before reached the recent toll, it has not been for lack of trying but for lack of success. If Israeli military operations against Palestinians have fallen short of this ferocity, it has not been for lack of desire so much as for lack of opportunity.

For a while, Israeli and Palestinian leaders invested in diplomacy, gambled on its effectiveness, and trusted in its primacy over force, out of political calculation, tactical considerations, or both. A majority of Israelis and Palestinians have at times favored a negotiated resolution and resigned themselves to necessary compromises. Each diplomatic venture ended in failure. Each failure rekindled the gravitational pull of an existential, pitiless struggle. In the end, what mattered was the balance of power and brute force. Those who mattered most knew it best.

October 7th and its aftermath provide the starkest of reminders. Gaza played host to the conflict’s multiple historical layers of enmity, rage, and revenge. Strip away the occasional ceasefires and peace deals that turn out to be neither; what remains is a naked contest that originated long ago and stubbornly refuses to go.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies may have been more vocal about their determination to crush Gaza; with time, internal cracks have begun to appear in Israel, as many of its citizens wish for a ceasefire to bring the remaining hostages home, or as images of starving Gazans shock even the most hardened. But the forcible dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, the deprivation of their basic rights, has been a hallmark of the Zionist movement and of Israeli governments. There were differences among them, some of which mattered deeply to Israelis. None fundamentally affected the condition of being Palestinian. Many outsiders openly dream of an Israeli government without Netanyahu and his partners, one led by those they hope would replace them. That dream was not of an imaginary future; it had often been yesterday’s reality. It did not bring Palestinians any closer to fulfilling their aspirations, nor did it truly soften the blows they endured. It is convenient to personalize this affair, to turn it into the story of a single individual and his loathsome associates. Netanyahu is the ideal offender, one whose ouster would set things right. He makes it so much easier to exonerate previous Israeli governments that also sought to liquidate the Palestinian cause, eliminate its leaders, and deepen Israeli dominion; to absolve his political rivals who seldom challenged those actions; and to clear the United States, which most of the time obediently abetted them throughout. He makes it easier to look away.

There is convenience, too, in conscious efforts to single out Hamas. October 7th was neither uniquely Hamas nor distinctively Islamist. It was Palestinian through and through, so much so that even Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, so critical of violence, so convinced of its futility, took a long time before he could bring himself to utter a single negative word about it, and then primarily for other political motives. Hamas’s religious doctrine, not its resort to violence, is what sets it apart from Fatah, its chief rival for leadership of the Palestinian national movement. From the start, Fatah’s defining trait was armed struggle, often with scant heed to whether its victims were civilian or military. Both Fatah and Hamas are sprouts of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational organization dedicated to the Islamization of Arab societies. But whereas Fatah’s founders broke ranks with the Brotherhood in the nineteen-fifties when they decided to engage in guerrilla warfare, Hamas’s future leaders at first concentrated on domestic matters, prioritizing the religious transformation of Palestinian society over an armed confrontation with Israel. Of the two, paradoxically, Fatah has the more militaristic pedigree, and Hamas was the latecomer to violent struggle. Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who designed the October 7th operations, in this sense bore more in common with the Fatah of old than with the Muslim Brotherhood of today.

October 7th was entirely unforeseen and wholly unsurprising. Little about it was original: not the violence or thirst for revenge; not the focus on Gaza; not the attempt to kidnap Israelis; not the goal of releasing Palestinian prisoners; not the aspiration that it might trigger more sweeping regional change; not the overwhelming Israeli response much of the world views as disproportionate and most Israelis perceive as necessary; not Israel’s methodical, systematic assassination of any Palestinian it deems complicit; not the labelling of Israel as a colonial state, of Zionism as racism, of Palestinians as modern-day Nazis; not America’s collusion, confusion, and impotence. This latest iteration of the conflict was also among its most primitive. Now shorn of the pretense of a hollow peace process, it could revert to its original form.

Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction were not one-offs or historical exceptions. They were reënactments. They made quick work of years of a peace process that had become a sore farce. They reached deep into each side’s collective memories and then let loose their most abiding emotions. Hamas did not invent anything; it reclaimed a Palestinian past. Israel’s reaction was not unusual either, but a concentrated, magnified version of a long Zionist tradition of how to deal with the land’s Arab inhabitants. Palestinians and Israeli Jews also came to regard the other side’s actions as fulfillments of their own national nightmares, ethnic cleansing for one and extermination for the other. It is no surprise that they both so freely bandied about historical metaphors of yesteryear: a reprise of the 1948 Nakba for Palestinians; another Holocaust for Israelis. Residents of southern Israel paid for all the pain and humiliation Palestinians had suffered at Israeli hands. The people of Gaza paid not only for Hamas’s actions but for Nazi crimes as well. History does not move forward. It slips sideways. And, in the darkest of ways, repeats itself.

The Gaza war shattered notions that, for years, have been activated on behalf of a peace-process mythology. They exposed myths that surrounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: about the role of history and violence; the nature of Israeli and Palestinian sentiments; the promise of bilateral negotiations; the realism of partition between two states; the motivation and efficacy of American policy. This was not the first time that they had been exposed, and being exposed in no way guaranteed that they would be dismissed once and for all. But surely it should have proved harder after Hamas’s lethal operation and the Israeli government’s cataclysmic response; in light of sweeping Palestinian support for the former and overwhelming Israeli backing for the latter; in the wake of violent settler activity in the West Bank that conjures up prospects of ethnic cleansing and displacement, and of the nascent resumption of Palestinian attacks after a two-decade lull; against the backdrop of America’s unwillingness or helplessness to do much of anything about any of it, of European spinelessness and uselessness, of the gap between the indignation and the apathy of Arab governments—surely, it should have proved harder after all that, to blithely repeat bromides about the peace process, the two-state solution, or the central role of U.S. diplomacy. Whatever certainties had taken refuge in American minds, now would come time for their retirement. It was not to be. The world after October 7th was built on lies.

Some were expected, as when Israelis described how humanely they treat Palestinians, spoke of their Army as the world’s most moral, and claimed that military pressure would get the hostages out, or when Hamas denied the horrors that happened on that day. America’s falsehoods were most startling because they were least necessary. Joe Biden’s Administration presented Hamas’s attack as disconnected from history, the expression of “unadulterated evil,” the work of “animals;” praised Netanyahu for holding back unhinged extremists in his Cabinet, resisting their “enormous political pressure;” claimed that America was determined to stop the killing and was doing all in its might to that end; made repeated announcements of imminent deals for a ceasefire that left Israel, Hamas, and even its two co-mediators, Egypt and Qatar, baffled by the groundless optimism; placed the entirety of the blame for the failure of those ceasefire and hostage negotiations on Hamas even as Israeli officials, some in boast, others in lament, ascribed copious responsibility to the Israeli government, and even as several American officials privately blasted U.S. tactics. Eventually, in a gutsy historical rewrite, some U.S. officials sought to portray its post-October 7th policies as resounding successes. The failure to achieve a lasting ceasefire, release the hostages, prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, and avoid the war’s regional expansion—all of which the Biden Administration had identified as core goals—was a necessary precursor to Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s downfalls, Iran’s defanging, and the Syrian regime’s collapse. Warts and all, the outcome was according to plan.

These assertions go beyond guile, opportunism, cruelty, despair, or self-preservation. No one believes them. Those who utter them must know that no one believes them. They make little sense, their objective hard to discern. Yet they inevitably have a cost. The earnestness with which they are spoken is not redemptive. It is confounding, which makes them the more destructive. They breed cynicism. They are the kind of falsehoods that erode any support for any endeavor undertaken in their name. Words still matter but in unintended ways. The more the falsehood is told, the more it invalidates the point made. Its only lasting impact is to accentuate disbelief. That happens when the universal accountability for which the United States calls exempts Israel, pretending it can be counted on to judge its own. It happens when the United States arms the Israeli hand that strikes the victim and then pleads with it to stop. “To kill someone and walk in his funeral” is an old Arabic saying that says it all: America delivers weapons that kill women, children, and the elderly, that destroy homes, schools, and hospitals; it provides meagre humanitarian aid to sustain Palestinians who survived the latest U.S.-enabled attack only to await the next one. It happens when America assumes the maddening pose of moral conscience of the world and helpless bystander to its horrors. The air of anger, grief, and mourning that accompanied every American pronouncement on Gaza’s fate fooled nobody. Actions matter, not words that, in their perversity, made matters worse. Palestinians compared this to the old Mafia tradition of caring for those you are about to liquidate and to Rome’s gladiators saluting Caesar before proceeding to be slaughtered. Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant.

Of all the falsehoods dispensed during the war, one of the more perplexing was the Biden Administration’s repeated homage to the two-state solution. The malady is not America’s alone; in recent weeks, President Emmanuel Macron announced France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, a step toward a putative two-state solution that he describes as the “only” path to peace. He was followed in short order by the U.K., Canada, Australia, and others. This is where the story passes beyond demagoguery and deceit and heads for the absurd. The two-state solution is dead, has been for some time prior to October 7th, and has been made all the more illusory in its aftermath. It is not about to be revived by virtue of another collective incantation or recitation of the mantra. The idea of partition has been around for more than eighty years. In terms of longevity, creativity, and the rotating cast of characters involved, it would be hard to fault the quest for its achievement. Yet regardless of setup, content, personality, or style, the result did not vary. Plans were met with questions, reservations, rejection, bewilderment, violence, and, more recently, a yawn.

Efforts to achieve two states failed under far more auspicious circumstances. They failed when the Palestinians were still unified; Israeli public opinion, by and large, could live with the outcome; settlements were a fraction of what they are today; and the two peoples could imagine some form of peaceful coexistence. At the height of America’s post-Cold War power, with leverage to spare, a phalanx of U.S. Presidents designated Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority but proved incapable of bringing a two-state solution any closer. When, under Barack Obama’s Administration—which included officials more understanding of the Palestinian cause than ever before—the effort sputtered and stalled, President Abbas seemed to lose faith. In a caustic remark to one of us, he suggested that even were America’s team to one day become staunchly pro-Palestinian and the Israeli government to be led by Meretz, the country’s most left-wing Zionist party, still, there would be no Palestinian state.

Yet the two-state solution enjoys persistent, international backing that nothing—not the years of trying and failing; not mounting Israeli rejection nor growing Palestinian indifference; not developments on the ground that stubbornly move in opposite directions and leave the idea of partition ever further behind—has been able to challenge. Proponents grasp for reasons to still believe in its possible realization. Today, they might look to dramatically altered local and regional circumstances—Israel victorious and self-confident; Arab states forced to reassess their stance; an unpredictable and atypical American President who can turn on allies and warm up to foes; a battered, isolated Palestinian leadership. They cling to the hope that, combined, these circumstances may lend life to the idea of two states on terms that Palestinians previously would not have countenanced and that Israelis currently see no reason to endorse. They cling to it even as they are incapable of describing a realistic pathway to its achievement. Queried for a road map to two states, Martin Indyk, the late American diplomat, veteran peace processor, and a staunch advocate of its inescapability, told one of us a few weeks before his passing, “I don’t have one, but we should persist.”

Deep down, believers in two states, confronted with all reasons to surrender their faith, fall back on a single argument: there is no realistic alternative. Partition is considered inevitable even as it becomes harder to imagine because they are not capable of imagining anything else. In July, 2024, then Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked if the two-state solution was dead. He said, “Not only is it not dead—it cannot be dead.” It is the sole possible, enduring outcome because there is no other.

No other? An array of alternatives exists, each dismissed as unpalatable or impractical. All have historical roots, many once considered and debated, just to be cast aside during the Oslo years, when the two-state solution—whose roots were shallower—ruled supreme, became the lingua franca, and all else was deemed heresy. The most likely result is perpetuation of the status quo, under which Israel controls the entirety of the territory between the River and the Sea and imposes differing degrees of authority over Palestinians under its dominion. One American official after another has asserted that it is unsustainable, undeterred by its having endured for decades. Secretary John Kerry’s 2013 warning that the two-state solution would be “over” in a year and a half prompted Israeli officials to chuckle—a half-century-old unsustainable status quo was a status quo with which they could live—and later to grumble: If the window had closed in 2014, why could not the United States finally call it a day?

A version of current conditions has lasted for decades despite repeated objections and obituaries, far outstripping the nineteen years during which Israel did not control the West Bank or Gaza. Those who claim today’s situation cannot persist say that it would be a regime of apartheid and that the world will not countenance a state in which one class has every privilege and another lacks citizenship and an equal right to vote. The world has tolerated it so far, rationalizing its forbearance by describing a fifty-year-old reality as temporary and a two-state solution as inevitable; it is hard to imagine why this attitude would change and why the passage of time, far from hardening opposition, would not take the edge off it instead. Palestinians may rise up, but Israel has experience dealing with the threat of Palestinian violence; its vast military preponderance and memories of the aftermath of both the second intifada and October 7th may not prevent deadly acts of violence, but they may well discourage any serious, large-scale Palestinian revolt. The status quo will work for those who can subdue or kill those for whom it does not work.

Israel could tinker with reality, annex parts of the occupied territories and withdraw from others, and grant Palestinians enhanced measures of autonomy and self-governance and better economic opportunities, all without blunting the Jewish state’s over-all control. With greater decentralization, Palestinians would be provided greater ability to run their daily lives; they could still vote in municipal elections and have a say in matters that directly affect them. Proponents question why this would be less democratic, more apartheid-like, than the ersatz Palestinian state that peace plans have proposed, bereft of an army, genuine control of its borders or airspace, or a truly autonomous foreign policy, and subject to Israeli military incursions—which is the most that any Israeli official, left or right, contemplates. They ask what, beyond imagery and language, is the difference between sovereignty-minus and autonomy-plus, between Palestinians voting in a diminished national state and Palestinians voting in fully empowered municipalities; whether that difference is one of kind or merely of degree; and why one outcome would deserve international acclaim, the other global opprobrium.

Israel might go further still and forcibly transfer or ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. That eventuality, seemingly far-fetched not long ago, is eerily plausible today. The idea of population transfer is not novel, having been advocated as early as 1937 by the Peel Commission to buttress the formation of Arab and Jewish states; carried out by Israel to various degrees during the 1948 war and since in efforts to achieve the goal of maximum territory with minimum Arabs; imagined more than once by Israeli leaders as a solution to the insoluble problem that is Gaza. Many consider the prospect abhorrent, unthinkable, even. This conflict has a way of sanitizing what at one time was unfathomable, converting obnoxious practices into acceptable behavior. Ethnic cleansing dressed up as voluntary departure. The killing of civilians imagined as armed resistance. The taking of innocent lives presented as self-defense. Time is the normalizer of all things. Ethics pose no obstacle to creative vocabulary.

Other alternatives once contemplated have fallen to the wayside: a Palestinian confederation with Jordan, comprising the Hashemite Kingdom and the West Bank, which Israel—viewing a Jordanian security presence in the West Bank as more reliable than a Palestinian one—might fear less than an independent Palestinian state. This, too, is a throwback to the past: In 1950, Jordan annexed the area west of the Jordan River that remained in Arab hands; only decades later did its king sever legal and administrative ties to the West Bank and recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. After the P.L.O.’s acceptance of the two-state solution in the late nineteen-eighties, Abu Iyad, then one of its senior-most officials, spoke of Palestinians enjoying five minutes of independence before engaging in talks with Jordan on a form of confederation.

Earlier still, prior to Israel’s founding and to the time that partition became the vernacular of the day, some Arabs and Jews thought of a single, binational state with equal rights for all, irrespective of religion or ethnicity. Others advocated a single nonsectarian state with varying degrees of communal autonomy, in which both peoples might enjoy the freedom to regulate and take care of their domestic affairs: Israel/Palestine as a decentralized federation with an overarching security structure but in which each community is self-governing on matters such as culture, education, and language. Ze’ev Jabotinsky himself, guru of most of the Israeli right wing, toyed with similar ideas before settling for Jewish reign. Again, the past echoes: not so long before Israel’s establishment, under the Ottoman Empire, the area that was to become Mandatory Palestine was governed by a patchwork of regulations that afforded a sliding scale of rights to Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

Each of these possibilities raises significant moral, political, or practical problems. None meets all Israeli or Palestinian core demands. Some of the morally least desirable, like continuation of the status quo, are more likely; some ethically more agreeable, such as a single binational state, are less realistic. But they are alternatives, on whose supposed absence two-state proponents rest their case. What distinguishes two states is not closeness to realization or a workable pathway to success but a long record of failure that ended in death, desolation, and despair. If the best argument for the two-state solution is that no other outcome will work, then it is not an option with much of a leg to stand on. The two-state solution cannot be superior to all other alternatives if it is not an achievable alternative at all.

The two-state solution has become a dangerous gimmick. It is an object whose pursuit has been heralded for years for reasons wholly unrelated to its attainment. In earlier days, America’s claim that it was working toward two states helped it build a regional coalition against jihadists and Iran or counter the appeal of more militant Palestinian groups. Under Biden, the aim was to promote Saudi-Israeli normalization. Today, the goal is to placate restive domestic opinions and distract attention from the West’s moral cowardice as it shies away from tangible steps to stop Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. Listen to Macron, who points to vanishing prospects of a two-state solution as his nonsensical rationale for recognizing a nonexistent Palestinian state. To Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, who argues that failure to achieve a two-state solution via negotiations led his country to consider conditionally recognizing the state of Palestine—if the Palestinian Authority commits to reform—as if the right to statehood depended on the nature of one’s government, and as if such a state could come about without Israel’s consent. Or to the U.K. Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who, by threatening to recognize Palestine should Israel fail to change course, did not bother to conceal that he cynically deemed it a mere bargaining chip. It is all so unserious.

Tomorrow is yesterday: the past has a say, and it exposes the lie that has become the two-state solution. The past came rushing back with October 7th and the wars that followed, but they were merely the trigger. It returned as an old glossary: Nakba, genocide, the Holocaust, pogroms, settler colonialism, Palestinians-as-Nazis; the kibbutzim attacked on that day referred to as the Warsaw Ghetto, hostility to Israel as modern-day antisemitism, Zionism-as-racism. It came back in the form of old mental attitudes, to a time when Israelis and Palestinians could see no possible shared future, when the land was viewed as too slender for the two peoples. In Israel, talk of controlling all the territory, of clearing it of Palestinians, of ethnic cleansing, and of Jordan-is-Palestine, edges its way into the mainstream. Among some Palestinians, one senses a desire to end Israel’s existence, a fleeting belief that it may be possible, and a gloomy resignation to the status quo, or worse. The signs had been visible for some time, history itching for a comeback. As in earlier days, each side dreams of ridding itself of the other. That only one has the means to bring this idea closer to reality affects reality, not the dream.

Tomorrow is yesterday: a calamity has befallen the Palestinians, and they join their forebears in treading this path. They have been here before. It is a second Nakba, a relapse captured in images of throngs of Gazans who flee their destroyed homes, once, twice, three times, and of Israelis who plant flags upon the abandoned debris. Palestinians stand alone as they did in 1948, once more betrayed by Arab brethren, once again forsaken by their official leaders, who have nothing to offer other than indignation and vacuous pablum, or by leaders of Hamas, who had a plan to provoke Israel, no plan to deal with the foreseeable aftermath of the provocation, no way to protect their own people. Back in those earlier days, after the catastrophe of 1948, Palestinian politics had to rebuild from scratch, in fits and starts, punctuated by individual acts of violence or collective, more dramatic attacks, born of desperation and hunger for revenge. A long political march again stands before Palestinians. At its conclusion, Fatah and Hamas may still be around. Neither will remain as it is.

Tomorrow is yesterday: Israel has a brush with devastation but emerges victorious. The peril validates its existential fears and the image it has of Palestinians; the military conquest justifies the faith it places in the power of its arms; the world’s reaction confirms that, although it must seek the support of others, it can truly count only on itself. Israel, as it has so many times in years past, searches for alternative ways to manage Palestinian territory. It experimented with direct military rule after the 1967 war; toyed with handpicking West Bank Palestinians to do its bidding under the Village Leagues in the late nineteen-seventies; gambled with the Palestinian Authority after Oslo. Tolerating Hamas’s rule in Gaza was another attempt; forcibly displacing Palestinians from their land was a recurrent desire.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process was built on illusory hope; when the process collapsed, the hope was swept away and a repressed past came to the fore. This need not be a recipe for despondency. A breakdown of this magnitude, a physical, human, and political wreckage this absolute, can unveil uncomfortable truths, purge falsehoods, restore life to concepts once scorned as profane. It can help dispose of the fantasies that paved the way to calamity and prompt a comprehensive rethinking of the conflict. There is urgent work to be done—to end the carnage in Gaza by imposing tangible costs on the perpetrators of the ongoing slaughter. But also to unearth old ideas that the two-state stranglehold suppressed and to consider approaches to the conflict that touch on the essence of a struggle that will not be resolved by drawing lines on a map but by the long and arduous process of coming to terms with cruel history, deep-seated fears, and frustrated yearnings. The outcome might not be peace, another pipe dream whose pursuit produced nothing but grief. It could be practical arrangements that allow two people to live side by side and coexist.

Conditions are ripening for such unconventional thoughts. The idea of a hard partition between two ethno-religious states was not preordained. It derived from the ways outside actors chose to apprehend Israeli-Palestinian relations and from the underlying assumptions—virtually all originally European and alien to the Ottoman reality of the time—reflected in that choice. Many who continue to defend the traditional two-state solution stress the unrealism of its one-state, democratic, secular counterpart. They have a point. As morally attractive as it may be, to simply do away with ethnically or religiously based political entities and replace them with flat, individual citizenship based on equal rights is unlikely to fulfill a basic need of Israeli Jews and Palestinians: to feel safe and secure and to live as they wish in their chosen communities. But the binary choice between a single state and two separate ones is false, unnecessarily constricted. There is a range of in-between outcomes, a spectrum that reflects gradations of sovereignty and degrees of religious or ethnic autonomy. A state is a state is a state, only it is not.

Today, all is up for grabs. Heresy becomes convention. Success is ephemeral. Force invites counterforce. Victory is not a safe place. Israel’s military obliteration of Gaza does not result in total triumph. Palestinian militancy is not redeeming. The enormity of what happened in so short a span of time beggars belief. When change occurs at a frenzied pace and takes divergent roads, it is a sign of the fragility, desuetude, and inauthenticity of what preceded it. The Oslo peace process is dead. The two-state solution, dead. Participants in those efforts, discredited. The United States, exhausted. Israelis and Palestinians are left without a script or compass other than relics of earlier days. They settle in for the long haul, reverting to more familiar, established ways. What they lived through in recent decades was a detour that brought them back to where they began.

The future will be one of surprises. Israelis perhaps will awaken to the emptiness and absurdity of their military victories. Palestinians might find unity and a new politics, willing to fit Israeli Jews in their vision. Israelis and Palestinians might uncover novel ways to talk, and imagine new modes of living together. Arab states may use the prospect of normalization to achieve reconciliation with Israel and succor for Palestinians. The United States might start to see itself as others do—self-righteous, hypocritical, futile—tire of its own platitudes and lies, and consider a change. A new generation of American leadership could face its own moral reckoning.

The realization may dawn that this conflict is not essentially about territory. It is not about roads and dunes and hills. It is about people, their lives, emotions, anger, grief, attachments, and history. Going down this path may not resolve everything, forever, but it may at least bring about some relief, for now. ♦

This is drawn from “Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine.”